Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!mtunx!pacbell!ames!mailrus!husc6!rice!titan!phil From: phil@titan.rice.edu (William LeFebvre) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech Subject: Re: Who did it! Message-ID: <1547@thalia.rice.edu> Date: 16 Jun 88 16:50:37 GMT References: <180@snll-arpagw.UUCP> Sender: usenet@rice.edu Reply-To: phil@Rice.edu (William LeFebvre) Organization: Rice University, Houston Lines: 23 In article <180@snll-arpagw.UUCP> paolucci@snll-arpagw.UUCP (Sam Paolucci) writes: >I have a suggestion. Lots of people worry about the Amiga crashing >when they are using it in a multitasking mode. We all know that by >and large improperly written software (including COMMERCIAL) is >responsible for this. The effect of improperly written software is >multiplied in a multitasking environment. The result has been in >giving the Amiga a reputation of crashing easily, even though the >operating system is not responsible in most case. I mildly disagree...(oh boy, let's start another OS debate).... I think one of the duties of an operating system is to protect processess from one another. That's resource allocation and control. You are right in that if every program was completely correct then the system would never crash (independent of hardware failures). But when is the last time you saw a completely correct program that actually did something useful? ("hello world" isn't very useful.) They aren't very common, especially when the programmer has to be responsible for deallocation in addition to allocation. William LeFebvre Department of Computer Science Rice University